PIFF films hold a mirror to society

This year’s Portland International Film Festival, fondly known by many Portlanders and audience members as “PIFF,” is going to make you think – and feel.

Each year, the three-week film festival – organized by the Northwest Film Center and running March 7 through March 21 – chooses a theme that loosely ties together the more than 100 foreign films and documentaries that premiere at the festival, along with feature-length films, shorts and documentaries made by Oregon and Pacific Northwest filmmakers.

“Empathy has no ethnicity” is this year’s theme.

Empathy is the experience of understanding, even feeling, another person’s perspective, of viewing the world through their eyes.

Among this year’s selections are films centered on families in various states of loss or turmoil or dysfunction or absurdity, people fleeing the Nazis during World War II, a young man returning home as he attempts to write his first novel, a group of Afghan women who take up competitive road cycling.

"Transit" is a German and French film that takes place during World War II with characters trying to flee France.

Image courtesy of the NW Film Center

Ben Popp, who programs and organizes all of the Northwest Film Center’s Northwest and regional film screenings, including the Northwest Filmmakers’ Festival, spoke with Street Roots about this year’s PIFF, as well as empathy, filmmaking as a political act, traditional and experimental filmmaking, and the films by Northwest filmmakers being shown at the festival.

Amanda Waldroupe: What do you hope people will get out of the festival besides seeing a bunch of great movies?

Ben Popp: I was just out in Montana for the Big Sky Documentary Festival. I was able to see a lot of films, and it felt like it was this massive tidal wave of tragedy and love that you were being hit with. And it was really intense. But it was really good at the same time, too, because you were sort of embedded in the world through cinema, and that was allowing you to come out of the theater and have those really strong emotions that were kind of almost cathartic in a way.

That’s the hope – everyone is going to be able to see so many films, see so many stories that are representative of different people, of different walks of life. And (then) be able to say like, “Hey, you saw this, I saw this. How is this related to the world now? How is this related to what we would like to be? How is it related to the past?” Just seeing that idea of cinema is a mirror of us and being able to look at that mirror and say like, “Wow, that’s really interesting.”

Waldroupe: The theme seems overtly political this year.

Popp: That’s true. As a filmmaker, it’s hard to hide from that, simply because you are trying to put your own voice out there, and how you see things and trying to reflect upon that, as well. So, just in the nature of saying, “What is my place in this world? What is my reflection, or reflecting back on my place in this world?” I think it inherently just becomes political.

Waldroupe: And forcing viewers to see, view, hear, learn about people or places that they would not necessarily be exposed to and making them sit through that for an hour and a half, two hours.

Popp: There’s also this idea of process, too. In terms of the idea of film as a process – a mode of creation that’s very narrative driven versus a mode of the story that’s experimentally driven. Those two things are very interesting as well. You have audiences that are brow beaten with one particular form, and you have this other form of medium and the art that is much more open to different ways of expressing itself.

There’s a filmmaker here in town – an animator – but the way he creates his movies are (with) still images; it almost looks like a storyboard. (He uses) audio, (and) still images go to another still image. Normally everyone would say, “That’s not animated.” But it’s the way it’s put together and the flow and the rhythm, it’s something that carries you along. On our end, it’s especially important to be able to offer those variations, rather than just being like the Regal Cinema or something like that.

Waldroupe: Let’s talk about the regional films. The Oregon films in past festivals have taken on really important issues, like “How to Die in Oregon,” which followed people choosing to end their lives via physician-assisted suicide, and “Lean on Pete,” which really touched on abandonment and poverty, among other things. What stories are the Oregon films telling this year?

Popp: Sky Fitzgerald’s “Lifeboat” is a documentary about refugees trying to escape war-torn regions, and Sky has a very particular style of trying to be very much engaged in (the story) and embedded himself with the subject. Then you also have a filmmaker like Sika Stanton and their Oregon Canyon, which is about the geographical landscape, basically looking into the state of Oregon and its racist past, but saying it from the landscape of a map and saying, “Hey, this particular canyon got its name from one of the first black homesteaders.” But look at the rest of the state map and see these racist names that are still there. It’s a very eye-opening kind of thing like that.

There’s also Anna Yeager’s film, “Why I Fight.” It’s about four different young Latino women talking about how they are trying to make their way in the world, a landscape that might not necessarily be for them or at least, open doors for them the way they (open) for white people. It’s really great to see their perspectives, but at the same time, it’s really just these shots of them on the ocean, on the beach, and maybe some visual imagery with the landscape, the wind, but then also the vocalizations as well … really speaking to their dreams, what it is that their desires are.

Now, it’s interesting: You have these stories (in multiple films at the festival) that all sort of embody this element of wanting to escape.

Waldroupe: I noticed that in the descriptions of the film.

Popp: (There’s) like really frantic energy, high energy-ness of (being) trapped and “I wanted to get out of this.” I think that very much ties into, again, this day and age we live in, because as an artist you’re making something and you cannot help but take in your surroundings and everything around you. Even if you’re dealing with personal stuff and you start feeling bad, you look on the news or whatever and it’s like the whole world ...

Waldroupe: It’s even worse.

Popp: It’s even worse! Thinking of the idea as films always being this mode of escaping … looking at these stories that are almost like a deeper in through the story is escaping while the audience is escaping to get out.

Waldroupe: One thing causing us so much anguish and illness is that there is the realization that in many marginalized and vulnerable communities, the people within them are trapped in some way. Trapped by their socioeconomic circumstances. Women were, or are, trapped by the circumstances that caused the Me Too movement. Undocumented immigrants are trapped by the legal system and the asylum system. Maybe in the past couple of years it’s become very obvious that it’s far more pervasive than we thought.

Popp: Yeah. It’s a giant collective kind of thing. We’re so much more aware of this now than it ever has been. And maybe some of that’s showing through in the stories.

“Our Bodies, Our Doctors” is a documentary by Oregon filmmaker Jan Haaken about the doctors and nurses who ensure a woman’s reproductive health rights.

Image courtesy of the NW Film Center

Waldroupe: It really forces us to break out of our typical thought processes about what we expect when we see a film. That breaking apart or that challenge is inherently necessary to begin to feel empathy.

Popp: I would agree with that, yeah. Your eyes start getting open a little bit more and saying like, “Oh, wow, there’s something else.” Fear starts dissipating. And that’s exciting. And hopefully if people can embrace that in some way beyond cinema and with life in general, it allows for more communication to happen, more discourse to happen, and more positive interactions rather than negative reactions of simply saying, “I refuse to interact in and/or engage because I’m afraid.”

Waldroupe: To go back to this idea of Regal Cinema and being browbeaten as an American film viewer. I feel browbeaten by Marvel these days.

Popp: (laughs) Me too.

Waldroupe: I feel like our cinema landscape is so dominated by action and maybe sensationalism. Are we using film as a means for eye candy?

Popp: I think in the way of Marvel and stuff like that, most certainly. In terms of other independent cinema, not as much anymore because everything is going to episodic, online content. There’s lots of distribution platforms, and theaters that may not carry this stuff. So you have these filmmakers who are looking at it as their craft, saying, “Hey, I still need to be able to make this film and tell the story and tell it very differently from this other person,” very well knowing that they may not get distribution, very well knowing, but they are not going to maybe get paid back or so on, so forth. So the idea of cinema simply becoming one way or the other is not necessarily true, either. It’s just a matter of, to get to a point where hopefully some other distributors, theaters would be able to say, “Hey, we should try to do some more of this.”

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